Hot sculpture

From
Mark Firth

The feature on Jim Acord, the artist who dreams “of marrying nuclear technology with art”, makes much of his achievement in gaining a licence to handle radioactive materials (“Artistic licence”, 9 December 1995).

I am a London-based sculptor dealing with science as my subject matter. In 1989 I wanted to make a piece about randomness at the quantum level and about the “natural” quality of radioactivity which was, I felt, quite unjustly condemned as a man-made evil. Obtaining a sample of caesium-137 was simplicity itself&colon; I sent my cheque to a firm in the US and two weeks later …